Privacy policy

WattSnap is run by Fold Digital Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 09898457), 31 Cattle Market Street, Norwich, NR1 3DY. Fold Digital Ltd is the controller of any personal data the site handles and is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office. For anything about your data, email [email protected].

To work out what a panel could generate, the scanner asks for three things. Here is what happens to each.

• Camera. The picture is shown on your screen so you can aim. It isn’t recorded, saved or sent anywhere.
• Motion and orientation. Read in your browser to measure which way and how steeply you’re pointing, and to trace the skyline if you do a sweep.
• Location. Taken from your device if you allow it, or from a city or coordinates you enter instead.

To get real solar data, your browser sends our server the location (to about a metre), the panel’s direction, tilt and size, and the skyline you traced, if any. Our server passes these to PVGIS, the free solar database run by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, and sends back the figures. We don’t save them to a database, and nothing identifies you by name.

We do this because you asked for an estimate (our legitimate interest in providing the tool). If you’d rather not share an exact location, pick the nearest city or enter rough coordinates.

A result link holds the figures shown on the result: panel watts, yearly kWh, electricity price, panel cost, how the power is used, shading and how much of the skyline you swept, and whether real satellite data was used. It doesn’t include your location. The link itself is the saved result, so we store nothing, but anyone you send it to can see those figures.

There’s no sign-up, waitlist or newsletter, and the site doesn’t ask for your email address. If you email us, we use your message and address only to reply, as our legitimate interest in answering you. Our email is hosted by Fastmail.

We use Google Analytics to see how the site is used, but only if you click “Accept” on the cookie banner. Until then it doesn’t load at all. With your consent, Google collects things like the pages you visit, your device and browser, your approximate location from your IP address, and clicks on our partner links. The lawful basis is your consent.

You can change your mind any time with “Cookie settings” in the footer. Declining after accepting deletes the Google Analytics cookies and reloads the page.

The site sets no other cookies.

“Get a quote” buttons go through our own link and on to the partner’s site, tagged to show the visit came from WattSnap. We don’t pass on anything about you or your result. Once you’re on their site, their privacy policy applies.

• Vercel hosts the site. Like any web host, it processes your IP address and the pages you request, including the solar lookups above, to serve and secure the site.
• PVGIS (European Commission Joint Research Centre) receives the location, panel and skyline details needed to calculate your estimate.
• Google runs Google Analytics, only if you accept.
• Fastmail hosts our email.

Vercel and Google are US companies and may process data outside the UK. Those transfers rely on the UK–US data bridge (the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework) where the company is certified under it, and otherwise on the UK’s International Data Transfer Addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses.

• Solar lookups are cached by our host for up to 30 days so repeat requests are quick. The cache is keyed on the location and panel details, not on who you are.
• Hosting logs are kept by Vercel for its standard period. We haven’t set a period of our own.
• Google Analytics data is kept for 2 months, Google’s default.
• Emails you send us are kept as long as we need them to deal with what you asked, then deleted.

Under UK data protection law you can ask us for a copy of your data, and ask us to correct it, delete it, restrict how we use it or stop using it. Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time. Email [email protected] and we’ll reply within a month. Because we don’t store results or accounts, we often won’t hold anything that identifies you.

If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk. We’d appreciate the chance to put it right first.